Between Alienation and Revolution: Incursions into Collectives of Soirees in Metropolitan Public Spaces in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Abstract

Following the tracks of the soiree collectives in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, this article aims at analysing the role of the dimension of everyday life, which according to Lefebvre means the constant movement between the tendency to repeat and the capacity for social transformation, the constant movement between routine and invention. These collectives are formed by young people, most of them residents of peripheral areas who have revealed themselves to be holders of a new subjectivity capable of explaining their place in the world and justifying their existence drawing from the pride of being peripheral, which results in a new way of political action. The daily life lived, perceived, and conceived in the context of their social and symbolic place occupied by the peripheries and their social actors has been reframed in the face of a set of social transformations and, consequently, it produces new public spheres and new ways of expression of emancipatory struggles. The ethnography carried out seeks to apprehend the intertwining of poetry, performance, and the occupation of public space. The critique of everyday life reveals those patterns of behaviour, organization strategies of groups and subgroups, networks of relationships and networks of meanings, as well as systems of material and symbolic exchanges. Indeed, such collectives are expressions of everyday resistance, manifested in poetry, in bodily expressions, in the way activities are organized and performed. In these soirees, critical and political reflections are collectively created, making the creative and liberating capacity emerge.